Just one week after removing the price tag from its Ovi maps and navigation service, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) has hit the one million mark. According to the company, consumers have downloaded the service 1.4 million times, an average of one download per second.
Nokia executive vice president Anssi Vanjoki said that this growth rate is even faster than Nokia expected and it’s had an effect on Nokia’s Ovi store as well. The storefront is now averaging one million downloads per day. Nokia is seeing the most action in China, Italy, UK, Germany and Spain, although the service covers 180 countries. Beginning next month, all new GPS-enabled Nokia devices will include the new version of Ovi Maps preloaded.
With today’s announced milestone, it appears Nokia could easily surpass Google with its global subscriber reach, as well as give personal navigation device makers like Garmin and TomTom a run for their money. The installed base is also good news for Nokia’s third-party developers and operators looking to sell data plans, as Vanjoki noted in a press release. Nokia will still have some issues to figure out as to how to monetize the service if selling more phones doesn’t prove to be enough, but the consumer interest is certainly there to support its case.
Juniper Research analyst Windsor Holden noted that on the face of it, one million downloads might seem modest – especially compared to Apple’s app store’s rapid growth. But, given that Nokia achieved the milestone in only one week, is only available on a select number of Nokia smartphones and that the Ovi Store hasn’t been a selling point to date, the news is actually quite notable.
“With Apple, it’s the appeal of the store that’s driving users to the apps; with Nokia, it’s the individual app that’s driving users to the store,” Holden wrote in a blog today. “For Nokia, this will hopefully result in further, wider traction on the Ovi Store; the challenge facing the vendor is to make the in-store experience more user-friendly so that repeat usage levels are higher, and to expand the range of content on offer.”